Thursday, June 21, 2012

Did
Levi screw up in his book by telling the truth about Tripp's expected date of birth, thus showing Sarah lied at the Republican National Convention?

Levi
Johnston lies a lot in his book Deer in the Headlights. For example, on page 75 he
supports Sarah Palin's entire "wild ride" story about flying from
Texas to Alaska as her amniotic fluid was leaking. In fact, I suspect Sarah
told him what to write here:

She
[Sarah] wanted to be home rather than deliver in Texas so that her new son
could be a true-blue Alaska boy. She wanted this child, possibly a Down's baby,
to be delivered by her doc, who knew the deal, in our new medical center in
Wasilla.

The
idea that Palin and her doctor preferred, for the delivery of a premature
special-needs child, the dinky Mat-Su Regional Medical Center over, say, the
fully-equipped Providence Hospital in Anchorage, is ludicrous. She needed to
get to the Mat-Su center because she knew that her buddies on the board would
let her use the place for a birth hoax. But Levi not only backed that up silly
story, he describes what Sarah looked like immediately after giving birth (page
76).

As
the wonderfully perceptive Allison noted
at ThePalinPlace blog last October, Levi subtly slipped into his book a scene
in which Palin called him seemingly to cajole/bribe/threaten him into something
terribly important – such as not exposing the hoax (page 273):

Levi, this is Sarah.

No Shit.

Are you recording this?

Huh? What?

Don't lie to me. Are you taping this call?

She sounded uptight...

No, Sarah. I'm not.

Are you positive? Tell me the truth.

Sarah, you called me. How could I be recording this? And why? I
have no idea what the hell you want.

Then
Levi moves on without revealing the substance of the call. Allison argues
the circumstances suggest this call from Sarah probably came not long before
Levi's book was due to go press, perhaps shortly after Bristol's Not Afraid
of Life came
out in June of last year. Considering how Bristol trashed Levi in that book,
Sarah must have wondered just how vindictive Levi might be.

What
could Sarah offer Levi to keep him from telling the truth? Well, she has plenty
of money, and maybe it would not have taken that much, relatively speaking, to
get him to lie. She perhaps also could have threatened (by use of police
surrogates) to make life hell for his mom, who was and still is under house
arrest for selling part of her OxyContin prescription.

I
think Allison nailed it. Levi was letting us know he had the power to decimate
Sarah's reputation, and that she felt compelled to approach him to make a deal,
or more likely to reinforce a previous deal. Of course, by demonstrating his
power in that way, he was also letting us know his book could not be
trusted. Sad to say, but Levi's a naive kid who sold his self-respect in a
Playgirl spread and apparently his integrity in a deal with Sarah.

Various
commentators have picked apart Levi's book and shown problems with his
timelines. But one problem in particular I want to focus on is where (on page
137) he writes that on about December 26 he agreed to go on a snowmobiling trip
with Bristol's dad, Todd, because Bristol, he said, was not due for another three
weeks, meaning around January 17 – and then she surprisingly went into labor
the next day, and he rushed back to be there for the birth.

He
must have screwed up there in terms of making his narrative square with
Sarah's, because if Bristol was not due until mid-January or so, then Sarah
lied at the Republican National Convention in September, claiming that Bristol
was five months pregnant – she would only have been four months along if she
was due in January.

But
was the snowmobiling trip really in late December? Let's assume for the
sake of argument that the trip happened as described, but around the first or
second week of January – and let's also assume Levi inadvertently revealed the
true due date, around January 17. That scenario seems to work with the known
facts.

But
I don't buy that he got back in time to witness the birth. The Palins clearly
schemed to get him out of the way – that surely was the point of the
snowmobiling trip, since Todd could not stand Levi. That being the case, why
get him back in time for the delivery? The Palins likely were already planning
to kick him out of their house, which he says they did right after the birth.
Thus they probably tricked him into missing the birth to help cut him off from
Tripp – just as setting up his mother in a drug sting helped sever the link
between the families, plus gave Sarah a club to keep the Johnstons in line.

Then
what do we make of Levi's claim that he demanded an epidural for Bristol before
the birth? I think that Sarah, when she kicked Levi out of the Palin house in
early 2009, probably made her initial deal with him and told Levi to lie and
say he had been present for the birth. She may even have suggested that he
claim he demanded an epidural, which Levi seemingly bungled by suggesting it
was given in the first hour of labor, which seldom if ever happens.

Later
in 2009, Sarah said that Levi was not at the birth at all, which I think was a
screw-up on her part: she was so intent on trashing Levi at the time, she
forgot that she needed him to be a false witness to the birth, and thus let the
truth slip out.

So,
that's my hypothesis: Tripp was not born in December, but rather in January.
Levi was not present, but Sarah needed him to write in his book that he got
back in time for the birth.

But
I could be wrong.

One
nagging issue is that some observers have suggested that when Tripp was finally
shown to the media on February 17, on a Fox show, he looked unusually large for
his purported age – but a January birth should have made him look smaller than
expected. Maybe he was just a really big baby. Then again, maybe Tripp was born
before
December, as some smart people have argued.

6 comments:

Levi told Larry King in mid-April 2009, looooong before writing his book that he was there for Tripp's birth, but was unable to cut the cord, at 5:43 in the video below:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gISq87ckh0Y

CNN Transcript: (about 1/2 way down the page)

KING: Were you present at Tripp's birth?

L. JOHNSTON: Yes, I was there.

KING: Did you cut the cord?

L. JOHNSTON: No, I couldn't do that.

(LAUGHTER)

KING: What was it like?

L. JOHNSTON: It was -- it was cool. I mean, I never thought I'd be there, you know. I didn't -- I wasn't expecting to have a kid this early. But I thought I would always be, you know, grossed out. But it was -- it was exciting.

Thanks, KOA. I'm still inclined to think he wasn't there, because of the odd snow-machining trip with Todd. When he was first kicked out of the Palins' house, there must have been some sort of arrangement made immediately –- payments for lies and for not spilling the beans re hoax. Sarah's call in summer 2011 was likely based on her fear that Levi had had enough lying and was going to shoot her down.

Maybe the trip to the cabin took place the day after Thanksgiving instead of the day after Christmas. (And maybe I can't let go of the theory that Levi learned Bristol was expecting in March 2008 because statements he made indicate that's when he dropped out of school. )

This is a timely post, Brad. Thanks for the time you are putting into all of this. "Life's a Tripp" being released shows we aren't crazy, that family of liars is still trying to exert influence. I'm proud to be a Truther.

Hi Allison, I am proud to be a truther also. And just to keep our heads up, we should consider how flagrant hoaxes have often been imposed upon the public. Binyamin Wilkomirksi's Holocaust memoir Fragments actually won prizes all over Europe - a story which was not, and could not, have been true.

When one considers something like that, one has little compunction in saying that Levi is lying about the birth stories, and that his accounts should be further scrutinised. There was an explanation, on a different blog, of how before publication the projected page total of Levi's memoir was suddenly altered - a whole lot of pages disappeared. He may have given in to pressure at the last moment.

Or he may be more active in the hoax than one would think. There are all sorts of interests involved.